It is the best of faiths, it is the worst of faiths. It is the faith of tolerance, it is the faith of hate. Opinions of Islam in the world could hardly be more diverse or more opposed.

However many times one hears it said that Islam is not a unitary phenomenon - that the Sufis are as different from the Salafists as chalk is from cheese - almost everyone, after pronouncing this caveat, proceeds to speak or to write as if Islam were a unitary phenomenon. This is the great achievement of the Islamists: they have turned the nastiest imaginable form of their religion into the only one that counts for non-Moslems - and for an increasing number of Moslems too. It is as if the Spanish Inquisition had been made the sole legitimate representative (to use the cant term of the 1960s and 70s) of Christianity.

The claims that Islam has in its history been religiously tolerant are difficult to disentangle in an honest fashion. Without an axe to grind, you would hardly even consider the question. Islam is a religion but Moslems are people, and their conduct may not always have been what religious enthusiasts would have wanted them to be, or believed were religiously required. Then again, what is religiously required has been a matter of dispute: and extremism has not always prevailed over pragmatism.

To behead or eviscerate? Or could the question be....”At what age do you strap a bomb to your child and send them out to kill jews?” Or possibly, “Is the woman good enough for me if even her own Uncles would not rape her?”

Send it all back to the Stone Age where it belongs. And get it out of our country. The PC crowd that perpetuates the tolerance of this repressive death cult, should be banned from the U.S. along with it. America is not an Islamic repository. Let us be SMARTER than the rest of the world and keep it that way.

Mohammed went into “trances” and fits (like epileptic fits) when he was given the “word of God” and would shout out what he was told. These would be written down by his followers. This is the makeup of the Koran.

When Mohammed was just walking and talking and acting like “normal”, his words and deeds were written down by his followers and this went into the Hadith. Now, acting “normal” for Mohammed was taking 12+ wives (including a 6 year old), taking slaves (including sex slaves), executing infidels, conducting raids for treasure, etc.

Now, this is where it gets complicated.

A large part of the words he spoke in trances were “taken back” by Mohammed. He determined them to be the work of the devil (thus they are called the “Satanic Verses” and these are the same verses that Mr. Salman Rushdie got in trouble for writing about).

Now, how Mohammed determined which verses were from God and which were from Satan I do not know.

Also, there were literally dozens of widely different versions of the Koran and Hadith floating around for several hundred years after Mohammed death until a Fatwah was decreed to destroy all but one version. Now, even Mohammed could not remember what he was told by God and forgot it (those are his words as written in the Hadith) so I do not know how the powers in charge decided which was the correct version.

Also according to the Hadith, Mohammed turned people into monkeys, you can determine a child’s sex depending on whether the male or female has an orgasm first (that advice came directly from the Angel Gabriel), dogs and cats are evil and should be killed, that the devil lives in your nose at night (and how to get rid of him in the morning), chess is forbidden, muslims have one intestine while infidels have seven, dont pray looking up or your eyes will be snatched away, that one wing of a fly is poison but the other is the cure, that drinking camel urine is good for you and I could go on.

And that Mohammed himself didn’t even know if he was going to heaven. If even Mohammed doesn’t know, what chance does the average muslim have?

And for some non-PC info, Mohammed was described as a white man.

Now, if you can bear it, to compare to the Gospels of New Testament.

Jesus was someone who lived a very humble life and was killed for basically saying he was a King and Son of God (blasphemy) by the powers in charge (Roman and Jewish). The government wanted Jesus destroyed and wanted his growing movement destroyed (as it threatened their power). If, after 3 days, the followers of Jesus proclaimed he has risen from the dead, (just as he predicted), and is truly our Savior, the High Officials would have wanted to destroy such a “myth.” They could have easily done this by producing the dead body of Jesus and saying “Your Messiah is still dead and so is your movement” or producing many eye witnesses of the dead Jesus. But they couldn’t.

The letters that make up the New Testament were written by the eye witnesses of the events of Jesus. They were written in just one generation when many other eye witnesses were still alive. They were written without collusion from other Apostles. Even if any of the Apostles wanted to “add” to the “myth” of Jesus, they would have done so in a very disjointed and easily detectable fashion. Yet, the main Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that describe the life of Jesus are amazingly in harmony with one another and the small differences are consistent with what we would see today if four people witnessed a major event and wrote about the event apart from each other. The Gospels can be traced back to their sources and are basically unchanged from their originals.

The Bible is the most investigated historical document in the history of the world. It has been investigated by scientists, philosophers and archeologists using technology undreamed of when the Bible was written. It is been desperately tried to be “disproved” for over 2000 years, yet, the Bible still stands as the truth.

The stories of Jesus still make sense to us today. It may be because they are true, it may be because they are based in love or it may be because they were written to tell the people of the Word of God.

Regards,

2banana

6
posted on 08/02/2007 7:22:01 AM PDT
by 2banana
(My common ground with terrorists - they want to die for islam and we want to kill them)

This reads like “here are a few good Nazis”. The fact is most Nazis did not commit horrendous crimes, but the ideology necessarily espouses violence hence the need for denazification after the war. It is very easy to draw parallels. The koran does not imply violence, it mandates it. The verses are clear and precise.

Send it all back to the Stone Age where it belongs. And get it out of our country. The PC crowd that perpetuates the tolerance of this repressive death cult, should be banned from the U.S. along with it. America is not an Islamic repository. Let us be SMARTER than the rest of the world and keep it that way.

That is the essence of the question. Islam is violent and savage at its very (odd!) foundations.

Have Christians done bad things? Of course. Calvin wanted to and tried to establish a theocracy and even put to death other Protestants; Huguenot pirates roamed the coasts of Europe attacking and killing innocent people in little villages on the coast of Spain and destroying the Catholic churches. Catholics pursued heresy through the Inquisition in a way that was certainly non-Christian. But none of these actions reflect the teachings of Christianity, but instead were things that arose at a particular time and actually had purposes that were certainly more political than religious. And that is the reason we view these things as anomalies, and not as the standard course of the religion.

Islam, on the other hand, has its violence built in, along with its theocratic structure (when it has its way, which it usually does not, fortunately), its bizarre attitude towards women, sex and morality, and its desire to subjugate the world.

Imagine if the fight between Catholics and Protestants in northern Ireland was far more widespread? Say a return to the vicious 30 Years’ War in Europe? On top of that, if the largest seminaries in the world were there, sending radical Catholic and Protestant priests and reverends around the world to stimulate all other Catholics and Protestants to involve themselves in the fight.

And not terribly hypothetical, since the bitter hatred and bad behavior in northern Ireland was and is real; though in the rest of the world a fight between Catholics and Protestants is laughable.

But back to Islam. Its imaginary deficit is that there is and can be no moderation in its ranks; though unlike Christianity, moderates are as of yet in the great minority. If enough moderates evolve, with whatever distortions and rationalizations to the original doctrines they use, then moderation will prevail. Again, there are more than adequate numbers of scriptural arguments in Christianity to have sustained horrific, bloody feuds for many years; that today are just ignored in favor of moderation.

Do not look to religion for consistency.

So what are the real deficits of Islam? First and foremost, unlike with Christianity, Mohammed never enumerated what are the principles of good government. In Islam, might makes right to a great extent. Allah favors the strong precisely because they are winners, He is indifferent to methodology.

To overcome this, the moderates will eventually have to justify the hallmarks of good government via contortions in their theology. Their doctrines will have to be reinterpreted to justify democracy, ethics and transparency in government.

But their great explanation will actually be fairly simple, a catch all to great variances in traditional interpretations: that these tools of moderation *must* be favored by Allah, because they work where other systems do not.

In other words, democracy is better than a dictatorship because it works, it is an efficient and effective form of government.

In another case, Jihad means a “spiritual struggle”, NOT a physical fight. And they could cite endless examples to show how Muslims who were terribly oppressed, say in the Soviet Union, but fought not with guns but with prayer, overcame their oppressors. And at the same time, those Muslims who engaged in violent Jihad died like rats and suffered terribly. Their martyrdom not only wasn’t martyrdom—IT DIDN’T WORK.

If Islam is so wonderful, then why is it that countries in the global south, example subsaharia Africa are embracing Christianity bigtime. So much so that it is going thru a boom time in the addition of new church communities and are sending missionaries to the west to bring the Gospel back to a west that so very much needs it.

Calvin wanted to and tried to establish a theocracy and even put to death other Protestants

Wrong on both counts.

Dr. McGrath points out "how deeply the myth of 'the great dictator of Geneva' is embedded in popular religious and historical writings," and points to the work of Balzac and Huxley as examples of writers who made assertions without any historical facts supporting them, but who nevertheless seem to have had more influence in the shaping of the modern view of Calvin than the facts of history. [emphasis mine] 7 The Genevan reformer was "denied access to the city's decision-making machinery. He could not vote; he could not stand for office."8 In fact, he still had little power over his own church affairs!Was Geneva A Theocracy? by Michael Horton

...This is the great achievement of the Islamists: they have turned the nastiest imaginable form of their religion into the only one that counts for non-Moslems - and for an increasing number of Moslems too. It is as if the Spanish Inquisition had been made the sole legitimate representative ... of Christianity.

The claims that Islam has in its history been religiously tolerant are difficult to disentangle in an honest fashion. Without an axe to grind, you would hardly even consider the question. Islam is a religion, but Moslems are people, and their conduct may not always have been what religious enthusiasts would have wanted them to be, or believed were religiously required. Then again, what is religiously required has been a matter of dispute: and extremism has not always prevailed over pragmatism.

...But what is the moral of this history, if there is one? It is certainly not one of the immemorial goodness and tolerance of the western tradition and the immemorial wickedness and intolerance of the Islamic one. I suppose a Martian, on reading this story, might come to the conclusion that human beings were a bad lot, and that he had better leave Earth as soon as possible.

...But there is another moral to the story, and I do not think it is one that is encouraging about Islam as a force in the modern world. For many centuries, the record of Islam was probably no worse, and might even have been better, than the western one, at least in point of religious tolerance (the Jews of the Maghreb in the Sixteenth Century certainly thought so). Unfortunately, this is a pretty dismal standard to measure anything by. There was, in fact, plenty of room for the Islamic record to be as good as or better than the western one, and still be very bad. Between dhimmitude and death, who would not choose dhimmitude? But that is not to say it was an enviable or morally defensible fate.

...In other words, the moral of Professor Storas book is that Islam, whatever its past glories, achievements, strengths and even tolerance by comparison with extremely low standards prevailing at different times elsewhere, has no means as yet of dealing with the modern world in a constructive fashion, and perhaps (though here it is impossible to be dogmatic) never can have such a means without falling apart entirely. I leave it to the experts to decide.

Theodore Dalrymple in his usual penetrating brilliance. Very educational!

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately on my page. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.

Yes, it must be terrible in the ME. No freedom to speak of. Can’t convert to Christianity. Can’t choose a young man to marry, let alone to speak to. Cannot drive alone if you are a woman. yadayada. And I believe they cannot speak out against any of this — look at the few brave souls who do. The Fatwa-Few.

The stories of Jesus still make sense to us today. It may be because they are true, it may be because they are based in love or it may be because they were written to tell the people of the Word of God.

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